Medieval England

English Kingdoms of the 8th Century

The subject of this lecture is royal power in the last century
before the appearance of the Vikings in England.

The eighth century on the continent was the era of Charles Martel,
Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne -- the Frankish leaders who established
the power of the Carolingian dynasty, forged an alliance with the
papacy, and built a Frankish empire and a theocratic kingship.

Offa of Mercia (the dominant English kingdom of the time,
ruled 757-796) was the one western king that Charlemagne called
"brother." Aethelbald (another Mercian king, ruled 716-757) and
Offa did not have kingdoms anywhere near the size of their Carolingian
neighbors, but in their sphere they temporarily provided a greater
English unity than had obtained before.

In the eighth century, we see a de facto division of the English
kingdoms -- a division that will recur in one form or another through
the Middle Ages. That division is between North and South, Northumbria
on one hand and Southumbria on the other (divided by the river Humber).
The two halves are not comparable in all ways.

Northumbria by this time was a reasonably well unified kingdom.

Southumbria was never the name of a kingdom at all; rather, Southumbria
was the more fertile Lowland Zone of Britain under another name.
There were several kingdoms there at any given time. In the eighth
century, however, it would be effectively dominated by the Mercian
kings.

The two halves of England were also ecclesiastically distinct.
The south was the ecclesiastical province of Canterbury, the northern
bishops depended on York, which had evolved into the second archbishopric
of England.

In the late 7th century and the early 8th, we have more information
about kings and their power than we have had before. There is not
as much as we would like, particularly for Mercia itself. Something
may have been written, but many churches and documents were destroyed
in the Viking era, and the history of Mercia may have gone with
them. So the lecture will have more general considerations
and few telling anecdotes than it might.

We'll begin with the effect of Christianization on English kingship.
It enhanced the position of the king, there can be little doubt.
The church gave the king the role of protector of the church, a
role it had been finetuning since the conversion of Constantine.
Oswald of Northumbria, who restored the true faith after apostate
kings had thrown off Christianity was regarded by Bede as a saint.
The field where he planted his cross became the site of miracles,
as did Oswald's tomb, after he was killed in a later battle.

Not every king could aspire to sainthood, but they all received
an ideological boost from Christian theories of worthy kingship.
How deeply the king's self-image could be affected is shown by the
curious phenomenon of kings retiring into monasteries at the end
of their lives. Several English monarchs gave up their thrones and
went to Rome so they could die there as monks and be buried near
the tomb of St. Peter. It appears that some eighth century
monarchs were deeply receptive of the sense of Christian duty that
bishops and monks were trying to instill in them.

Christianity did not merely change the ideology of kingship. It
changed the content of royal power and affected the methods by which
it was exercised.

First, the church was a source of patronage. Kings had influence
over the appointment of their bishops, and if they chose them
wisely, bishops could serve as valuable deputies. Kings had close
links to a number of monasteries they or their predecessors had
founded, and these too were potential power bases.

Second, the church was normally a supporter of royal power
and stable government out of practical as well as ideological
reasons.

A third factor was the introduction of writing and recordkeeping
as tools of government. This was barely beginning in the eighth
century. Charters, which recorded the transfer of land in a permanent,
detailed form, were increasingly important -- but charters in
this period were not official documents issued by the government,
but were drawn up by the churches and monasteries that recieved
the lands for their archives. Written law was introduced to England
almost as soon as Augustine landed. Writing was not yet an important
part of royal government, but the seeds of future developments
had been planted.

Let's look how royal power was exercised by three important
Mercian kings, Aethelbald (716-757) and Offa (757- 796), with some
reference to Offa's second successor Cenwulf (796-821).

These men exercised overlordship over Southumbria and, just as
important, over the church in southern England, with some ups and
downs, for over a century. They seem to be stronger kings than any
we have seen to date. Offa went so far as to dispense with
separate kings in Kent, Sussex, Hwicce (which is near Worcester),
Lindsey and East Anglia. Tributary subkings were replaced by ealdormen,
the official ancestors of both earls and sheriffs. These men were
deputies who oversaw a territory called a shire, supervising the
collection of taxes and defending the king's prerogatives when necessary.
In some cases the new ealdorman may have been the same person as
the old subking. But although he remained an important person, he
had suffered a demotion. In most cases the demotion was permanent.
East Anglia regained its independence, but the other dynasties were
gone for good.

To a neighbor like Charlemagne, Offa looked like the only real
king in southern England.

The Mercian kings were remarkable too for fighting the Welsh actively
and successfully. This was a major enterprise, because the Welsh
were no pushovers -- they gave as good as they got for quite some
time, and forced Offa to build a huge fortified frontier between
Mercia and Wales.

Political superiority was reflected in the way the Mercian kings
treated the church. They ruled or dominated the entire ecclesiastic
province of the archbishops of Canterbury, and thus exercised a
great influence on how it was run. In the days of Aethelbald, Mercian
candidates were elected archbishop, even though Kent still retained
some independence at the time. Aethelbald was also able to act as
the president of a church council of the province of Canterbury
in 746/7. Previously, the bishops had run their own meetings independently
of monarchs. Was Aethelbald's active role applauded or resented
by the churchmen? Probably both.

Aethelbald, like many other medieval kings, sometimes regretted
the pious generosity of his predecessors in giving away royal lands
and rights. Aethelbald found it necessary to insist, around 749,
that whatever grants had been made in the past, all lands had to
contribute men to the army and labor towards the building and maintenance
of bridges and fortresses.

Offa's position was stronger than Aethelbald's, and so he took
an even more prominent part in the running of the church. He (and
his successor Cenwulf, too) routinely presided over councils of
the southern English bishops. One of his great triumphs was his
presidency of a council in 786 where papal legates were present.
On this occasion, Offa got to play the role that Charlemagne was
playing on the continent -- pious king as protector, even head,
of a "national" church, a role backed by the acquiescence of St.
Peter's representatives on the spot.

The special religious role claimed by Offa was asserted the next
year, when Offa had his son anointed king by bishops, in imitation
of Saul and David in the Old Testament, and more directly, in imitation
of recent Frankish kings. The pope himself had anointed Charlemagne's
sons a few years earlier, thus giving ecclesiastical and divine
approval for the power of Charlemagne's dynasty. Offa hoped, in
vain it turned out, to smooth his son's way to the throne in this
way.

To return to Offa's position in the church. Offa could be very
high handed in getting his way. At one point, he decided his control
of the church would be more secure if Lichfield, a bishopric central
to his own territory, was elevated to the rank of archbishopric,
and given many of Canterbury's subordinate bishops. The archbishopric
of Lichfield was dismantled on Offa's death, but the Cenwulf inherited
the essence of Offa's power over the church. When the archbishop
of Canterbury in his time tried to take over monasteries connected
to the royal family, Cenwulf had him suspended from his position
for six years.

At least in Southumbria, Offa and Cenwulf had gained the kind of
ecclesiastical predominance that their brother monarch Charlemagne
had on the continent. Offa and Charlemagne are roughly comparable
in other ways as well. Offa was a king capable of conceiving of
and carrying out major projects. Offa's huge fortified Welsh frontier,
known as Offa's Dyke, is an impressive piece of engineering
and a demonstration of royal control of resources. Originally it
was 150 miles long, and made up of a ditch 6 feet deep backed by
a rampart 25 feet high. It was not fortified and so would not have
stopped a determined army. But a barrier this size would have been
quite effective in containing Welsh raiding and thus in stabilizing
the frontier.

The existence of the dyke cannot be explained without granting
Offa the ability to conscript tens of thousands of workers in an
organized fashion.

Offa and Charlemagne are both notable for their interest in regulating
and exploiting trade. Perhaps this is just the beginning of documentation,
and not interest, but since both men were more powerful than their
predecessors, we can say that their interest had more practical
consequences. Neither king seems to have doubted that they could
enforce their decisions on their own merchants.

This period also saw, both in England and the Continent, the first
practical, royally sponsored currency since Roman times. In England
it was a silver coin called, eventually, the penny. Offa's kingdom
seems to have produced millions of pennies. Each penny was worth
a substantial amount, but not so much as to make its daily use difficult,
which was the problem with many earlier gold coins. The gold coins
were medals, or jewelry, or even propaganda pieces demonstrating
royal wealth. The silver pennies were useful money, and their existence
both reflected increased trade and promoted it. The number
of coins indicates a richer, commercially more active society, closely
watched and systematically exploited by the king.

Offa was the first king to call himself "King of the English,"
and "King of the English homeland," in other words, King of England.
Cenwulf used the even more impressive title of emperor.

But their power, like that of Charlemagne's dynasty, was less stable
than it looked. Murder and civil strife were an almost constant
part of English royal politics. The English rule was that a king
must have royal blood, but there was no rule that said he had to
be the closest male relative of his predecessor. Lots of people
had royal blood, or could make a claim to it, and many did. Rivalries
and dissatisfactions within the aristocracy, a moment's weakness
in the then-ruling family, could lead to quick revolutions in power.

In the early ninth century this type of instability led to the
loss of Mercian supremacy in the south. Indeed, in 829, Mercia was
temporarily conquered by the King of Wessex -- if you can believe
the records preserved by the West Saxons. By that time, the country
was on the verge of a greater political revolution yet. In 829,
Viking raids had been hitting England for a generation. They were
yet small ones, but the big ones were just over the horizon. The
coming of the Vikings to England is our next subject.